“Was it good for you?” Gareth asked as she regained her place next to him.
“I hate being ignored. Do you think I got Stansill’s attention?”
A deadly rain of missiles fell against their positions, geysering dirt and gravel into the air on columns of fire. Two warheads smashed into the Hatchetman’s arm. A gauss slug blurred by her cockpit, plowing into the earth some sixty meters behind her, spraying soil and rock out from a lopsided impact crater.
“Yes,” Gareth said. “I’d say so.”
Both MechWarriors fell back, but slowly. Taking their turns at trading weapons fire with the advancing loyalists.
“Their line is erratic. He didn’t set himself well.” Gareth sounded excited. “We can’t stop them, but we can make it hurt.”
Tara had seen the same thing. Stansill’s failing to drive the Kelswa assault tanks to the front was a mistake. She gasped for air as her heavy use of the Hatchetman’s laser drove her cockpit temperature up another tick. “We stick it to them, then. Concentrated fire against weaker targets. We get him good and angry.” She raced her ’Mech back a few dozen meters. “We make it personal.”
It was already becoming personal. The loyalists powered forward in pursuit of the Republic line. Lasers and particle cannon spread out devastating lines of destruction. The barrage of missile and autocannon fire created a sound like rolling, continuous thunder.
“And then what?” Gareth asked, his Black Hawk stumbling under the initial onslaught.
Tara tightened her grip on the Hatchetman’s control sticks.
“Then we get ready to run.”
30
We delayed them several days at the zenith jump point. We rallied at the asteroid belt, and challenged their landing near Jasmine’s City. We have struggled against the Dragon for weeks, calling for help while spending the blood of our patriots. Where are the paladins?
—Final transmission, ComStar Station A7-O, Ashio, 21 May 3135
Terra
Republic of the Sphere
1 June 3135
Particle cannon discharges slammed back and forth across the no-man’s-land like Zeus’ lightning, indiscriminate and deadly. With dark skies piling up overhead, threatening more rain, it was as if the storm had started early, on the ground.
True thunder beat across the woodlands and river salient, all but impossible to distinguish from the echoes of missile barrages, autocannon, and sporadic artillery fire.
Fires burned out of control all along the Marne.
The Templar’s cockpit stank of ash and cordite. The air was filtered by the BattleMech’s life-support systems, but still tainted. Julian fought for breath. He licked sweat from his blistered lips and wrenched his control stick over to twist his machine around at the waist.
Not . . . quite . . . far enough.
Stutter-stepping, he leaned the Templar into the turn and snap-fired one PPC at an encroaching Scimitar. The stream of hellish energy slammed into and through its ferroglass canopy. For a heartbeat, every gunnery position and observation port glowed with an azure backlight. Then all went dark, and the hovercraft grounded in an awkward skid that tore up more earth and finally piled it up against a snag of tree stumps and boulders.
A temporary victory only.
“Guard-one, Guard-one, break off. We have a Schmitt leading into your blind spot!”
Too late. Gem-bright laserfire scorched his left leg, and missiles fell in a firestorm all around his position. The Schmitt registered on his HUD as it cleared a light stand of poplar, the tracked tank carving up soft ground and spinning a small rooster tail of mud behind it. Flanked by Regulators that swiveled their turrets over and slammed a pair of gauss slugs in his direction.
One missed wide, blasting a large crater into a nearby tower that had likely stood for hundreds of years. The other skipped off the Templar’s forward knee and slammed up into his right side in a hard-angle ricochet.
That kind of coordinated firepower threatened even a BattleMech, but Julian’s Guard responded with swift fury. A Fox armored car swung around the back side of the tower, Infiltrator infantry clinging to its top, leading one of the Guard’s two Centurions to Julian’s support. A lone SM1 Destroyer—not Callandre’s—raced up from the other side.
The Schmitt threw itself into reverse so hard that its tracks slipped for several seconds, trying to gain purchase. The Regulators crossed in front of it, hammering away with their gauss rifles, putting some hurt on the Destroyer which jumped and skewed sideways but rode out the hard hits.
Return fire chased the loyalists back to the trees, but there would be no pursuit. Again. A line of destruction suddenly walked a hard line between Julian’s strike force and the retreating vehicles, throwing earth and rock and great large columns of fire into the air and nearly into the face of the Centurion. The artillery barrage shook the ground, and the fifty-ton ’Mech dropped to one knee, shielding its cockpit with a thick, metal-clad arm.
“We have got to get some of those,” Julian whispered, but too loud.
“Sir?” Leftenant Dawkins, back in the Guard’s mobile HQ. The man coordinated all reports coming from every part of the wide-spread battle, and he never missed his cue. Not once.
Julian twisted back to a neutral profile, cut the Templar away from that line of death and faded back behind the tower, the great wall it anchored, and some tall willow trees.
“Those mobile defense systems. Paladin artillery vehicles.” His voice broke, and he swallowed dryly. “Their destructive line is impressive.”
The First Guard had heavy guns at their command as well, of course. Standard Long Tom artillery pieces. Julian could move them faster than a Paladin Defense System, but by using a fusion reactor a PDS supported two heavy artillery guns per vehicle.
“Noted, sire.”
And it would be. Jotted down in an electronic file, and forwarded back to the prince’s champion at the end of the battle.
If he were still alive.
Which, if Conner Rhys-Monroe had anything to say about it, wouldn’t be the case.
“If we’re not interrupting your planning session . . .” Callandre’s voice was strong and cutting in his ear. “We could use some help along grids four-five through four-seven.”
“What have you got, Calamity?”
“Not much. Just a Rifleman and two Pack Hunters gearing up for a major push. Oh, and Monroe is throwing—Verdammt! Nadelschlauch!—hovercraft down the Marne again.”
Ten years since his classes in Deutsch, Julian remembered those words rightly enough. And it took quite a bit to shake Callandre Kell. He throttled up into a run, pushing sixty-five kilometers per hour as he raced back to the riverside. Leaving the Centurion and the Destroyer behind to guard their flank.
Back and forth and back again. Forward. Then retreat, retreat, retreat. From an early, decisive victory at Meaux, Julian’s force had chased a wounded Spider right into the loyalists’ advancing line. At first they’d managed a standstill, even when outmassed. But as survivors from a southeast line of advance straggled in, momentum slowly shifted into the enemy’s favor. News of two sidelined paladins did not help, even if they had broken that third column near single-handedly.
Julian’s warriors couldn’t stand up to this for much longer. Even rotating units back to a small cadre of support vehicles for fresh armor when possible, the toll of nonstop fighting was beginning to dig deep into the Guards’ strength.
They didn’t have much more to give.
Julian’s Templar broke through a stand of willow, shoving aside the lazy branches with swinging arms. On the far side, Chateau-Thierry’s wide-bodied buildings crowded narrow streets, the old-fashioned town crouched up against the Marne as if afraid to come across. So far it had been spared much in the way of collateral damage.
Not so the near side, where the wide, flat riverbank, once pristine, was now a nightmare of grass fires and churned earth. A dozen vehicles lay still all along its length; some charred and smoldering, othe
rs still burning, and some just quietly dead.
The main fight raged further upriver but fell back closer on Julian’s position with every passing moment. And he had a chore to do here, first.
Chasing ahead of his fire team, Julian pounded across the bank and waded several dozen meters out into the Marne. It was the third attempt in an hour by Conner Rhys-Monroe to use the river as a fire road, trying to skate hovercraft and amphibious APCs quickly down the wide, still waters. This time Julian had missed closing the gates. Two JES carriers were already downstream, far beyond his reach. He pulled his crosshairs over an approaching MHI Amphibious APC instead, waited the extra second for his targeting computer to make adjustments for velocity and angle, then eased into his triggers.
Twin streams of hellish energies crackled over the river, snapping out small arcs of electrical discharge that jumped and skittered over the water’s surface like neon insects. Both arcs of man-made lightning slashed the APC from tip to tail, drawing long, angry wounds down its side.
Opening it up as the Destroyer slid out onto the waters, skated across the near surface and hammered through the rent armor with its assault-class autocannon.
What few scraps of protection the APC mustered were carved away, and the interior gutted by long, lethal streams of hot metal. It sank out from under the targeting sights, with only one Purifier infantry making a long, desperate leap for the opposite shore.
The Destroyer’s secondary machine guns ripped him out of the air. Like a well-trained attack dog, the SM1 about-faced and skimmed back across the river to rein itself in at Julian’s side.
But there were two more hovercraft approaching, guarding another amphibious personnel carrier. Julian couldn’t believe they’d try to run the gauntlet. And they didn’t. All three swung wide, racing for the far bank on which Chateau-Thierry continued to wait. By unspoken consent, both sides had avoided the small city. It was a truce Julian had been glad to see, though now it was about to be broken.
He watched as the hovercraft skated along the far riverbank, looking for a shallow slope. Dawkins confirmed that loyalists had turned some of their ground vehicles for the eastern bridge as well. Upstream. Julian could barely see the low-lying bridge near a turn in the river’s course. Clear so far.
“If they start using the city to get behind us, we’re in trouble.”
Dawkins, as usual, had just the news to relay. “We’re in trouble anyway. We’ve a second loyalist force chasing Tara Campbell and Paladin Sinclair in our direction. They’ll hammer us from north-northwest if we don’t fall back. ETA, forty minutes.”
A crawling sensation pricked at Julian’s scalp and along the back of his neck. Then he wrote it off as immaterial. “This battle will be over in twenty if we can’t keep that bank clear.”
He’d worry about the collapse of the northern defensive line later.
“Just a little help,” he whispered. Wading further into the stream, until the waters swirled sluggishly around his Templar’s waist, Julian reached for the nearest hovercraft at the far shore. A Scimitar. “Just a bit.”
He considered sending the Destroyer after them, chasing them down. But an assault cannon could do terrible things inside a tightly packed city if it missed. When it missed.
Fire support coming from inside the city firing outward, though, Julian hadn’t thought of. Or expected.
Laserfire slashed outward from a narrow alley, one Julian would have considered too close-quarters for an armored vehicle, much less a BattleMech. It caught the Scimitar in the front left fender, chewing through the hovercraft’s skirt. The vehicle listed as air spilled out from beneath it, but did not ground.
Not until four-score missiles slammed over it in a curtain of fire, smoke and debris. Sharp blossoms of fire tore away armor and engine cowling, ferroglass canopy, and a wide swath from the lift skirt. It exposed the high-speed fans beneath the craft. And when two final warheads detonated in among the whirling vanes, the fans shattered with catastrophic effect.
Pieces of high-velocity metal slashed out through the skirt like razors, spilling the Scimitar’s entire air cushion on one final blow.
The vehicle grounded, spun about on what little kinetic energy remained in the ruined lifters, and then jumped back up awkwardly into the air to pirouette through the cloud of settling debris.
The violence was so immediate, so surprising, the following loyalists had only seconds to respond. And in any crisis situation, even with trained soldiers, you had three basic personality types.
Those who froze, as the APC driver did, driving forward toward the same riverbank stretch where the Scimitar had just met its death.
Those who acted—even if turning directly away from the bank, and under the weapons of Julian’s Templar, wasn’t the best of options for the second Scimitar.
“The Scimitar is all yours, Lord Davion.”
And those who called for help.
It was a vaguely familiar voice, belonging to the pilot of the Vulture that side-shuffled out of the narrow alleyway. Painted in bright, bright white with gold and burgundy accents, it could only be one of the paladins.
And there was only one he knew of who should have been operating on the local lines, even if she was several hours late.
“It’s ours, Lady Avellar.”
The Destroyer powered forward to carve half the Scimitar’s nose away with its autocannon. Then Julian neatly sliced away the remaining half.
The hovercraft plunged into the river’s strong grip, throwing up a white sheet of spray. It quickly sank from sight, disappearing as, on the far bank, the amphibious APC also fell under the Vulture’s impressive firepower.
The Vulture did not dally. Maya Avellar turned it upriver, stalking the far bank as she protected the approach to Chateau-Thierry. The ’Mech had a limp to it, dragging its right foot just enough to keep her from full-on running speed.
“I will hold the bridge,” she promised, looking to be doing it by herself. “No one enters this city.”
Dawkins had followed the firefight and the arrival of the paladin. His Praetorian mobile HQ vehicle crawled down the riverbank, flanked by a bare-bones protective detail of Infiltrator and two Fox armored cars. “If she can do that, sir, we have a chance to withdraw. Set a new line once Tara Campbell and Sinclair link up.”
“Whatever you are going to do, Jules, figure it out soon. Conner’s pressing hard, and we’re hardly stopping to reset our line now.”
Julian waded his Templar out of the river’s grasp. He paused, shuffling the Templar in a tight circle, surveying the area. If Maya could hold the far bank—somehow—and if he could stop the two loyalists lines from collapsing against him in a classic pincer—some way . . .
It reminded him, actually, of the situation in which the Federated Suns found itself. Static position. An open back (against the Periphery). Two potential enemies looming up on different fronts. And without the resources to hold them both off. One fight or the other. Wasn’t that the choice?
And if it was, could he turn this battle in the same direction?
Only one way to find out.
Julian throttled into a walk that pushed his ’Mech upriver, the same direction as Maya Avellar. “Calamity, blunt the nose on Conner’s push. Chew it off if you can, but I want that line held.”
“It’s gonna cost,” she warned. The same words she had used in the simulation battle against Yori Kurita.
And he remembered his cavalier answer. Only this time, there were real lives on the line. There was no forgetting that now.
“Pay it,” he said. “We draw a line in the earth, here. This far. No further.
“And may fortune favor the foolish.”
31
Today on New Aragon, local political leaders (minus the world governor) held a joint press conference to declare the situation “hopelessly lost” and asking for terms of surrender from the invading Capellan forces. New Legate Kelly Simone branded the political triumvirate “cowards and traitors and the wor
se kind of leaders for a struggling people.”
—Damon Darman, New Aragon, 25 May 3135
Terra
Republic of the Sphere
1 June 3135
Tara Campbell nearly died within sight of Chateau-Thierry.
A slow patter of rain fell, dotting her ferroglass canopy with splashes of silver-gray. The droplets mixed with grit and soot, running muddy fingers down the outside surface, smearing her distant view of the city’s white brick buildings and the older gray stone walls that stood from centuries past, wars past.
The Republic force pushed in from the northwest, running upriver alongside the Marne. For the first time in an hour, she and Gareth pulled Cray Stansill away from Paris, teasing a rabid dog with fresh meat. Certain to be a short-lived chase as the MechWarriors trailed at the back of the widespread column, pulling rear-guard duty as they shepherded some of the slower vehicles. Two Jousts. A crippled M1 Marksman.
Both remaining Cavalry VTOLs flew high cover, crisscrossing overhead as they spotted for advance elements of the pursuing Senate loyalists.
They missed.
Two Stingers charged out of Belleau Wood from the north, one taking to the air on a high, arcing jump while the second ran beneath the VTOL coverage. A pair of Demon wheeled striker tanks chased after them. And from the direction of the river, a pair of Condors broke cover as well, coordinating a quick pincer.
The jumping Stinger swatted at the Cavalry attack copters with its rocket launchers, sending the fire-and-forget warheads on quick beelines. Two warheads missed. Two more slammed into the side of one of the fragile craft, blossoming bright and angry red, and nearly knocked it from the air. The stricken Cavalry cut around in tight circles, fighting for control, while the second VTOL ditched to one side.
The second Stinger rushed in behind the retreating line and slashed at Tara’s back with its large lasers.
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